Exclusive interview: Alastair Campbell on playing with Maradona being conned by Lance Armstrong and his passion for Burnley

After a lifetime spent either asking or answering questions, it takes something fairly novel to make Alastair Campbell pause for even just a few moments before delivering an emphatic response. But it came this week in an email interview. “If you lost your memory and your doctor brought your family in to jog your memory about who you were, what would they say?” He duly consulted his partner Fiona and, while he reckons that bagpipes and Blair might also be worth a try, they both settle on one definite answer. “Burnley”. It is also largely sporting rather than political themes when Campbell recalls those instances when he found his heart suddenly palpitate or could feel the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. Every audience with Nelson Mandela but, otherwise, meeting Muhammad Ali, Maradona and various moments from 50 years following Burnley. “Liverpool in the 2005 FA Cup,” he says. “I didn’t realise the cameras were on me. Live on Sky. I was absolutely frenetic. ‘Blow the ****ing whistle ref!’ We won. I left. Hundreds of messages, including from Fergie, who said that Neville and Giggs were watching and called him. ‘You’ve got to see this - your mate Campbell is going completely insane’. I do get like that with Burnley. Scotland as well.” Anyone doubting the authenticity of this anecdote need only watch footage of Burnley FC’s ‘Comms Cam’ on the opening day of the season against Chelsea when, having left his holiday to be at the game, Campbell took a turn in the press box alongside Phil Bird. Analysis at key moments might be limited to shouts of ‘get in’ and ‘c’mon’ but his passion is certainly beyond reproach. His home is also like a museum of sport and politics – and you are as likely to be faced with a picture of Burnley’s 1914 FA Cup winners or an iconic Tour de France mountain as Tony Blair or Bill Clinton. It all began growing up in Yorkshire and watching matches around the area with his Scottish father, who was a Partick Thistle fan. Campbell would never take his Burnley scarf off even during lessons – “the teachers tried but I wouldn’t” – and he spent much of his teen years in “petrol stations, hitching to games”. Personal anecdotes genuinely do encompass a ‘Who’s Who’ of sport. While busking in Cannes in 1978, he winged his way into a film reception attended by Ali. He recently interviewed Usain Bolt “who sang happy birthday down the phone to my daughter” and played football in the same team as Diego Maradona at Soccer Aid in 2006. He could not sleep before the game. Neither could Maradona and so they left the hotel for an impromptu early-morning training session. Alastair Campbell with Maradona Two things are striking. First, how Maradona – then 45 – was taking the game so seriously. He ran around the empty stadium visualising what it would be like to score. When the others players chanted songs about him on the team bus, “he had a tear in his eye and was thumping his chest”. When Campbell played his bagpipes in the dressing-room shortly before kick-off, he was “dancing with Zola on the treatment table”. The other extraordinary element was how Maradona was treated with as much wide-eyed reverence by the other players, several of whom had also won the World Cup. “These top, top, top, top players felt he was in a different game, on his own.” Campbell is naturally a Maradona rather than Pele man although, interestingly, he says that Sir Alex Ferguson once told him that Ferenc Puskas was the greatest player. Campbell’s relationship with sport would stretch beyond simply fandom and, more than ever, that is documented in the sixth volume of his diaries – From Blair to Brown – which were published this week. The first 100 pages largely deal with the 2005 British & Irish Lions tour to New Zealand and a 3-0 series defeat that became largely seen through the prism of Sir Clive Woodward’s decision to appoint him as part of his backroom team. “Like hiring the board of BP to perform an oil change on your car,” was how it was described in these pages by Paul Hayward. Alastair Campbell with Sir Clive Woodward on the 2005 Lions tour Credit: AFP It was an episode that certainly reinforced one overarching truism of sports PR: almost everything is shaped by results. Campbell says that the experience persuaded him that he “probably had too big a profile” for a communications job but he made friends and has no regrets. He clearly loved working with people like Jonny Wilkinson close up. “He was so intense but in an amazing way. He had an incredible modesty. He told me his brother was as talented as he was. I was like, ‘C’mon Jonny, you love your brother, but that’s not true’. He hated being special but even Brian O’Driscoll said to me, ‘Listen, in rugby, there is Jonny and there is everyone else’.” That inner force, believes Campbell, is a thread of sporting greats, albeit with very different manifestations. He once met Roy Keane over a cup of tea at half-time of a football match. “He was raging about the full-backs with an intensity that was ferocious. ‘Those guys should be ****ing ashamed to call themselves footballers. They are on £30,000-a-week’. I said, ‘Why do you care so much?’ He said, ‘It offends me’. “I interviewed Antonio Conte. I said, ‘Do you dream about football?’ He said, ‘No, no. I don’t really sleep. But I think about football before I go to sleep and I think about football when I wake up’. Alastair Campbell with his favourite possession - a signed Burnley shirt Credit: PAUL GROVER “I met Wenger at the French Embassy. He can hold his own about politics and the economy. He was talking about whether one day robots could be managers. I think he thinks about stuff like that.” One thing that struck Campbell about sport was the teamship. A bonding exercise with the Lions involved asking all the players to contribute to a painting. “Sport really latches onto it in a way that politics doesn’t,” he says. “After that painting, I said to Tony, ‘What do you think with the cabinet?’ He looked at me like I was completely insane but actually, ‘Why not?’. Why should politics be so different? Why not think, ‘How can we get these people to cohere better than they are?’ Look at the mess they are in at the moment – Theresa May and her merry bunch of w******".” One leader that does deeply impress is Burnley’s current manager Sean Dyche. Campbell says that he “could definitely see” Dyche as an England manager and believes that he is seriously underrated. Why? “Because of the voice, because of the way he looks and how he was a rough, tough Chesterfield centre-half. I don’t think he gets nearly enough credit for how clever he is. He’s got something special. He is a very good reader of human beings. He’s very funny. He just takes the piss out of me – has a running joke that I’ve got a butler.” Sean Dyche pretends to read Alastair Campbell's book At a personal level, cycling and running are the sports which now largely consume Campbell. He got to know Lance Armstrong and, as is documented in the book, believed in him following several interviews. “My daughter Grace watched the interview we did the other day. She said, ‘God, he just lied to you. That’s amazing’. He gave me one of the most amazing quotes I have ever heard. I had said, ‘OK, Lance you were dying from cancer. Was that scary?’ Yes, that’s scary. ‘You are about to take on Jan Ullrich in the Tour and you might lose. Is that scary?’ Yes, that’s scary. ‘OK, which of those feels worse? You might lose or you might die?’ He said, ‘Losing and dying? It’s the same thing’. I thought, ‘Wow, I love this guy’. “Of course, if I’d been a proper journalist I’d have thought, ‘Oh right, so you really would cheat. You’d cheat to stay alive so I’m surmising that you’d cheat to win’.” My five sporting memories | by Alastair Campbell I ask if it was an experience that made him cynical about sport and he relays a recent conversation with Dan Roan, the BBC’s sports editor, about how the next wave of scandals after governance and drugs might relate to player welfare. “I don’t think Lance Armstrong has made me more cynical,” he says. “When I see Chris Froome and people say, ‘They are all on it’, I say, ‘No’. I’ll defend him. Sport is about human endeavour and great stories of which there always seems to be renewal”. Before we go, Campbell seeks out what is clearly his most treasured of all Burnley shirts. “There you go - how many people in the world can have a shirt with Pele AND Maradona’s signature on it?” he asks, proudly holding up his memorabilia from the SoccerAid match. “And look at that. There’s Bradley Walsh as well. Pele, Maradona AND Bradley Walsh,” he says, before bursting out laughing. Volume 6 of Alastair Campbell’s Diaries, ‘From Blair to Brown’, was published this week